Coincidentally, that's often the same evidence cited by the haters.

Somebody must have intentionally spread all that bullshit about wildly-excessive water usage, for instance. It didn't go viral organically, or because it was true.

Maybe re-read the article? For an NPR piece, it's loaded with specific attributions and named names, of people pushing "Chinese influence operation" theories.

Or do you mean evidence of widespread (& effective) Chinese influence operations? The article's thesis is that those pretty much don't exist. Notice the quote attributed to Ben Nimmo at OpenAI.